Thursday, June 15, 2017

Common Sense, The Second Amendment And The Ballpark Terrorist

It took Hartford Courant editorial writers ten plump paragraphsto reach their
predictable corporate conclusion: “… Somehow this country must protect the fundamental
right to assemble in peace, whether to talk politics or play ball or sit in
school. The way to do that is to limit
the weapons that shatter the peace, not to silence the debate.”

There is little doubt that weapons may be used to shatter
peace. That is the operative principle of all terrorists and anarchists. The
weapons, as we have seen in recent days, may be various: suicide vests, trucks
and knives – all assault weapons, an assault weapon being any instrument of
death uses in an assault on human life, including, the editors of the Courant
may be surprised to learn, an abortionist’s scalpel.

The attempted murderer who took up arms against Republican
members of Congress at a Washington ballpark was obviously no respecter of the
First Amendment, which includes the provision affirming a right of assembly. The
right of assembly, prosecutors will tell you, is subject to some restrictions.
Terrorists have no right to assemble to destroy, say, the Twin Towers in New
York City. Republican and Democratic Congressmen do have a right to assemble to
commit legislation or to play baseball with each other in a false show of
patriotic unity.

The victims who assembled to play ball in Washington were a)
unarmed, and b) enclosed within a fence that made them easy prey for the
shooter, who was shot dead by armed capitol police officers on assignment to
protect only one of the congressmen in the ballpark. Had the congressman not
been there, the police would have been absent, and the other Republican
congressmen in the ballpark and their
aides doubtless would have been systematically slaughtered.

It was the presence of armed police on the scene, good guns
in the hands of the good guys, that prevented a mass slaughter. No one –
liberal, progressive or Trumpian – would argue that a) the police should not
have been armed, b) there is no moral difference between the shooter and
capitol police, or c) rights of assembly or rights of free speech should be
curtailed because, in an age of terrorism, the exercise of such rights provides
killing opportunities for criminals and potential criminals. Indeed, Courant
editors argue that Second Amendment rights should be curtailed to ensure a
robust expression of First Amendment rights; though, of course, exceptions
should be made in the case of professional defenders of the peace. Thank God
armed officers were present at the ballpark!

Very well then. The question arises: will gun control that
falls short of the abolition of the Second Amendment and universal disarmament get
the job done? Will even such an extreme measure get the job done?

And the answer, booming in everyone’s ears, is – no, it will
not get the job done. “The job” is to leave non-violent gun owners unmolested
while preventing criminal access to assault weapons, an assault weapon being
any weapon used in an assault; think for a moment of the average kitchen or car
garage as an assault weapon armory. The latest two terrorist assaults in London
involved mass murder by vans, readily available for rent everywhere gun laws
have been promulgated. London is a gun-restricted town. So is Chicago, Illinois,
whose gun laws are more restrictive than Connecticut’s. A couple of months ago,
Connecticut was deemed the murder capital of New England, and Connecticut’s gun
laws in the post-Sandy Hook period are among the most restrictive in the
nation. We have in our state gun control laws that do not prevent gun crimes
committed by criminals or potential criminals. Hartford and other of
Connecticut’s large cities are shooting galleries in which the shooters are
armed with weapons easily obtained by criminals and gangbangers, all of whom
have slipped the gun-control snares fashioned by easily conned politicians.

So then, the kinds of gun restrictions being peddled by
Connecticut’s two U.S. Senators, Chris Murphy and Dick Blumenthal, are at best
half-measures that will not and cannot prevent gun violence practiced by the
average terrorist, anarchist or homegrown professional criminal. The protections
offered by Connecticut's hoplophobic congressmen,
are violence-prophylactics with holes in them.

Only the abolition of the Second Amendment, the confiscation
of all guns in the United States, and an inescapable death penalty attached to
all crimes committed with weapons might – MIGHT -- reduce gun crimes in the
United States. Nothing short of such extreme measures may – MAY – get the job
done.

However, a disarmed general population elsewhere in Europe,
enjoying themselves in cafes and rock concerts, has not fared well against
terrorists with bombs strapped to their chests or armed with knives and
murderous vans. Disarmed Congressmen corralled behind a fence have not fared
well against an enraged Bernie Sanders supporter who had expressed his violent
distaste of a Republican President and Congress. Connecticut’s restrictive gun
laws have not brought the peace of lawful assembly to poor victims in Hartford
who have barricaded themselves in their houses against gang and gun violence.
Only armed and violent gangbangers and criminals are free to roam streets
unmolested in Hartford, the most dangerous city in Connecticut.

Such extreme measures as have been mentioned here are not on
the tables of Blumenthal and Murphy – just safe, pointless, vote getting
measures that touch only the lives of lawful gun owners.

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For
35 years a political columnist published in a variety of Connecticut newspapers,
Don Pesci has written for the Middletown Press, the Torrington Register
Citizen, The Waterbury Republican American, the Norwich Bulletin, the Day of
New London, the Journal Inquirer of Manchester, the Providence Journal, and
others; he is also the proprietor of a popular blog, Connecticut Commentary:
Red Notes from a Blue State, one of the older Connecticut blogs. Most of the
columns are printed here, roughly 2,500 entrees.